alt Hacker NewsIt states that half of aircraft pollution is from contrails made of aircraft soot.
I’d like to see the literature and discovery of aircraft soot.
As an engineer who has built aircraft, I find this fascinating. I would like to measure my amount of soot. How does one go about measuring how much soot I have?
Obviously if my exhaust ports are black that’s bad but I’m genuinely curious about this as I’ve always assumed “black smoke bad, white smoke ok”. As for contrails, disturbing the atmosphere is going to cause some freezing (clouds) at that altitude, at that temperature. How do you suggest we mitigate that? Fly lower and burn more fuel? Fly less and tell people to take the train or that their package will arrive next week?
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Fly less. Is waiting a week for a package really that big of a deal? Is traveling less really that much to ask?
It’s totally ok to be skeptical of the claims. I can’t make a judgement on them as I know even less than you might. But that’s not a reason to doubt that human’s environment impact matters and that maybe part of the solution is for those of us with access to 2day delivery for everything and cheap flights live a teeny bit more like those who don’t.
but contrails are not made of soot, where I define soot as dark unburned carbon, contrails actual are made of water. There is also a highly likely chance I am being to literal and the word choice of soot was a bit of poetic license on the part of the author.
As a bonus consideration it might be better if they were made of soot, it would be ugly but water vapor is a tremendous greenhouse gas, several times as potent as CO2, soot blocking the sun might have more of a neutral effect, And related, we worked hard to get sulfur out of our fuels but sulfur dioxide turns out to be a negative greenhouse gas, it has a net cooling effect, I am not saying we should deliberately add sulfur back in, the downsides are too great, but it is an interesting bit of irony.
It does not state that half of aircraft pollution is from contrails. It says half of the climate impact of aviation is from contrails. Soot can have other effects and cause pollution in other ways such as reducing air quality but I suspect that is very minimal compared to other industries.
The guide presented by the map gives a very good explanation on how contrail formation can be mitigating by altering the course of flights to reduce the formation in areas where it will have the most impact. This is based on a recent study that showed contrail avoidance could be one of the most cost-effective methods of reducing warming that we know of.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/ad310c
Simon Clark did a good video on this recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoOVqQ5sa08